“Me-too” products are fine
businessofsoftware.org
businessofsoftware.org
IMO biggest value of Me-too products are in their (even slight) differences from existing ones. For entrepreneur they obviously give him experience and may bring him money but from consumer point of view gains are smaller. Me-too products increase competition(making monopoly or stagnation less likely and bringing prices down), but straight up clones have same (relatively small) cost as me-too comments: decreasing signal to noise ratio.
Being another time tracking tool has a pretty good chance of being successful, assuming the definition of success is profit. Being the next facebook has a pretty low chance of being successful, with any definition of success.
Bring on new time trackers, calendars, etc - people will flock to the execution and ideas that give them value, competitors will learn from each other and good ideas will get incorporated in various services and products. That's great. Build another social network system... unless you're serving an extremely targeted niche, nothing will happen.
I think the big lesson to learn here is to carefully evaluate the microeconomics of the market you want to get into. To compete as a bootstrapped startup, you'd want:
1) No/low barriers to entry 2) No/low switching costs 3) No/low network effects
So for the time tracker example, you can start the business for the price of web hosting, LLC paperwork and software development. However, you'd probably want to invest time to make it easy for customers to switch from competing services.
Getting someone to use your timetracker can be an uphill battle, but unless they're deriving value from other people using the same timetracker, you've got a fighting chance of at least convincing them to give it a try. But if much of the value they get from timetrackerX is that all their friends and clients are also on it, and they share time info around... it's extremely hard to even begin to compete with that, because it's not a feature you can replicate.
Angry Birds is the maker's 52nd game. Overnight that.
It also wasn't an overnight success. It released in December 2009 and dropped off of the top paid app charts in the US without making much of a splash, and only began its meteoric rise months later after an update with more content and a lucrative negotiation for a "Game of the Week" iTunes feature from Apple.
You can view its history here: http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/angry-birds/ranking/history/...
With one of those things I got so fed up that I build it with a friend, and sometimes when I see someone complaining about this problem that we have tried to solve and I tell them about my site every now and then I hear "Hum... that already exists in the US, that is nothing." all I can do is laugh.
Because I think that it doesn't matter at all if it already exists. I have build it because I enjoy building it I don't aim to be the next Twitter or Facebook even they didn't ( Orkut already existed BTW) and if it becomes a company or any other thing Great! otherwise I can point my finger at the screen and say "I build that from scratch" and that for me is worth a lot.
Of course they might just come up with the same idea and find that there isn't a version in their first language, who knows.
Anyway, you can make an almost carbon copy me-too product to a new market and be successful.
Competition means there are customers who think X is worth paying money for. Competition means there are customers who already think X is the solution to their problem.
But design your own solution. Do your own research. Figure out how the competition is letting down specific segments of the market, why people are still arguing about which solution is the best X for Y. Figure out how your target customers are different, then build something that does a better job of satisfying their needs.
A few month's ago, a local spa popped up down the street that let people float around in big tanks of salt water for an hour. It was revolutionary - my corner of Virginia had never seen anything like it. But people would generally rather eat pizza than float about in salt water, and so they ended up going out of business in just a few months.
But if you enter a popular, saturated niche, you will suffer - you'll spend 95% of your time just catching up with the competitors. You'll spend time building bridges between your product and the competition. You would have to make hard choices whether to innovate or copy from competitor (and thus not forcing user to re-learn what they already knew). If you implement a feature users are requesting and the competitor does not have, people will not switch to your product because you are missing other features or because you have no way of contacting the users or because they are simply loyal to the competitor. You may win in the end, but it will cost you a lot - make sure you have more resources at your disposal than the best competitor has before you start.
That said I don't necessarily think your advice is bad, it just depends what you want.
I say this as a freelancer currently working on some products as well.
Maybe I just haven't been exposed to the self-selling side of this consulting.
...However, you really should try to minimize your me-tooism. By all means, copy a basic product idea, but also try to innovate (even if just a little bit). On the other hand, do not try and innovate too much - if your project borderlines on scientific research, you are probably going to fail - even if you figure out that critical algorithm, you still have to pour another year into building an actual business around it.
I wouldn't work for Rocket but I sure think their are very good at what they do, and useful too if they're able to bring startups like Stripe to us.
I have a "me too" photography proofing product... but there is a type of customer where my product is the best solution available for them. My conversion rate for these people is very high.
Most of us probably agree that having different task managers, bug trackers, CRM systems, programming languages, browsers, ERP systems (or even watches, monitors, displays, cars, t-shirts etc) is good. And there small improvements in me-too products can be great.
> If you have a small market share and you have
> to do battle with larger, better-financed
> competitors, then your marketing strategy was
> probably faulty in the first place. You violated
> the first law of marketing.
> The basic issue in marketing is creating a
> category you can be first in.This sounds good on paper, but is pretty much impossible to identify objectively in practice. Something can be "first" along many dimensions, so this depends entirely on how you categorize "first". First what? First productivity software, first document editor, or first document editor to offer WYSIWYG functionality? The only thing that really matters is being the first to offer a product that satisfies a customers needs on some dimension in a meaningful enough way for them to pay you money for it.